23. Penelope #2
I take a bath. Fill the tub until the water is just below the overflow.
Bath salts. A face mask. Candles—three of them, the vanilla ones my mom buys, the flame light flickering against the tile.
Music from my phone—low, Turnover, “Peripheral Vision,” the album I play when I need to feel something gentle while the world is being sharp.
The water is hot. I sink into it and let the heat hold me the way arms hold me—completely, without expectation, asking nothing in return. The warmth seeps through my skin and into the places where the cold from the warehouse and the jail cell and the van is still living.
The tears come. Not the panic kind. Not the breakdown kind.
The release kind. The slow, steady crying of a person who has been strong for twenty-four hours and has earned the right to stop.
I cry for Daisy—not the Daisy who held a gun but the Daisy who was Danny’s big sister and taught him to ride a bike and got caught in a man’s web and couldn’t find her way out.
I cry for Danny—the quiet boy who is screaming in a bedroom somewhere with blood on his hands and a hole in his wall and a hole in his family that will never close.
I cry for Cat—who survived another room, another man, another gun, and is running out of rooms to survive.
I cry for Iz—who carries everyone and is carried by no one.
I cry for Xander—whose father is in federal custody and whose mother’s house is his now and who fought in a cage tonight and held me on a couch and is downstairs hitting a bag because that’s how Xander processes grief, with his fists, and I love him for it even when it scares me.
I cry for myself. For the girl who started this year with teal streaks and concert tickets and a friendship bracelet and a future that looked like a straight line.
The line is not straight anymore. It’s a mess—tangled, knotted, doubled back on itself.
But it’s still a line. It’s still going somewhere. And I’m still on it.
I call Darla. She picks up on the first ring. “Penny? Everything okay?”
“I’m in the bathtub crying. Not an emergency. Just… the feelings caught up.”
“That’s healthy, baby. That’s your body doing what it needs to do. Did you use?”
“No. I wanted to. When Reece held those pills in front of my face at the warehouse—I wanted them so badly my teeth ached. But I didn’t take them. And tonight, when Ryan called about Daisy—the craving came back. Hard. But I didn’t reach for it.”
“That’s two major triggers survived in twenty-four hours, Penny. Do you understand how significant that is?”
“It doesn’t feel significant. It feels like barely surviving.”
“Barely surviving IS significant. Most people don’t even get to ‘barely.’ You got to ‘barely’ without a pill and without a relapse and that is a victory whether it feels like one or not.”
I sink lower in the water. “I’m scared, Darla.
Not of Reece—he’s gone. Not of Lucian—he’s gone.
I’m scared of the quiet. When the danger was external, I could fight it.
But now the danger is internal—the craving, the nightmares, the memories.
And those don’t get arrested. Those don’t go to prison. Those live with me.”
“Yes. They do. And we’re going to learn to live with them.
Not around them—with them. The memories don’t go away, Penny.
Your mother told you that. But they get smaller.
They take up less room. And the life you build around them gets bigger until the memories are furniture in a mansion instead of a body in a closet. ”
The image. The metaphor. The hope embedded in it.
“I’m calling in a prescription for you. Anxiety medication—low dose, non-addictive. It’ll take the edge off the panic while we do the deeper work in sessions. Pick it up tomorrow. And Penny?”
“Yeah.”
“You are one of my kids. Not just a patient. Mine. And I will fight for you the way your parents fight for you. The way Xander fights for you. The way Cat fights for you. You are not alone in this. You never were.”
“Thank you, Darla.”
“Get some sleep, baby. Take melatonin if you need it. Tomorrow is a new day and you’ve earned the rest.”
I drain the tub. Dry off. Pajamas—soft ones, the flannel set, the comfort clothing of a girl who needs to feel held by her own clothes. I climb into bed. Close my eyes.
The images come. They always come. The carousel. But tonight—tonight the carousel is slower. The images are there—the warehouse, Reece’s gun, Daisy’s face, the concrete floor—but they cycle at half speed. The edges are softer. The volume is lower. Not quiet. But lower.
Darla is right. Barely surviving is still surviving.
I’m drifting toward sleep when the door opens. Quiet. The click of the latch. Footsteps—bare feet on hardwood, the sound I know in my sleep, the sound of a boy who crosses hallways at night because the room he’s in is too empty and the room across the hall has everything he needs.
The bed shifts. He slides in behind me. Warm. His body curving around mine—chest against my back, his knees tucked behind my knees, his arm finding my waist. The hold. Not the grip from the closet, not the claiming from the alcove. Something else. Something that feels like shelter.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he whispers. Into my hair. His breath warm against the back of my neck.
“Me neither.”
We lie like that. Breathing. The room is dark—just the moonlight and the porch light through the window, casting gold lines across the blankets.
His heartbeat against my spine. My breathing slowing to match his.
The synchronization of two bodies that have been calibrated to each other since birth and find their rhythm automatically, the way instruments in the same key find harmony without trying.
His hand moves. Not urgently. Not with the desperate energy of a boy who is trying to claim or prove or possess.
Slowly. His palm flat against my stomach, warm through the flannel.
His thumb drawing circles. The absent, tender motion of a person who is touching another person because the touching is its own purpose—not a means to something else.
Just contact. Just the confirmation that the body beside him is real and warm and here.
I press back into him. Closer. My hand finding his on my stomach. Our fingers interlacing. The bracelet threads touching—his on his wrist, mine on mine. Teal and yellow braided between our clasped hands.
“We almost lost each other,” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
“Again.”
“Yeah.”
His mouth finds the back of my neck. Not a kiss—not yet. Just his lips resting there. Warm. The exhale of a boy who is holding a girl and is not going to let go and is not in a hurry to do anything other than hold.
Then the kiss. Soft. Against the nape of my neck.
The place where my hairline meets my skin.
The place that makes me shiver—not from cold, not from fear.
From the tenderness of it. From the gap between this touch and every other touch he’s given me—the closet, the alcove, the bedroom.
This is none of those. This is new. This is the version of Xander Anderson that exists in the dark when all the armor is off and the mask is down and the boy underneath is just a boy who almost lost a girl and is grateful she’s breathing.
His hand moves from my stomach. Up. Under the flannel top. His palm flat against my ribs. Not grabbing. Resting. Feeling me breathe—the expansion of my lungs, the rise and fall, the proof of oxygen entering and exiting a body that is alive.
I turn my head. Find his mouth with mine.
The kiss is slow. Unhurried. Tasting like toothpaste and salt—tears he shed downstairs that he didn’t tell me about.
His tongue against mine, gentle, not demanding.
Asking. The way my dad taught him. The way the program taught him.
The way he is learning, one kiss at a time, to be the boy who asks.
“Is this okay?” Whispered against my lips.
“Yes.”
His hand moves higher. Under the flannel.
Tracing my ribs. The curve of my breast. Cupping—not squeezing.
Holding. The warmth of his palm against my skin and the softness of his touch and the absence of urgency that I have never experienced with this boy.
Every other time—the closet, the bedroom, the night of the withdrawal fight—there was urgency.
Claiming. The need to prove something to himself or to me or to the universe.
Tonight there is nothing to prove. There is only us. And the dark. And the breathing.
My hand reaches back. Finds his hip. Pulls him closer.
The front of his body against the back of mine—every point of contact a conversation.
I can feel him—hard against me through the thin fabric of his boxers and my flannel pants.
But he doesn’t push. Doesn’t grind. Doesn’t do the thing the old Xander would have done.
He just… exists. Against me. The evidence of his want pressed against my lower back without demand.
“Xander.”
“Yeah.”
“I want you. But not the way we usually do it. Not tonight.”
“Tell me.”
“Slow. Just… slow. I need to feel you without the fire. I need to know you can hold me without consuming me. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” His voice cracks on the word. Not from desire—from the weight of what I’m asking. For a boy who learned love from violence and tenderness from my dad and the difference from Darla, “slow” is the hardest speed. “Yeah, I can do that.”
His hand leaves my breast. Trails down. Across my stomach. Under the waistband—not rushing, not diving. Sliding. The pace of a person who is paying attention to every centimeter and treating each one as its own destination rather than a stop on the way to somewhere else.
His fingers find me. I inhale. His mouth against my ear. “Still okay?”
“Yes.”
He touches me the way he’s never touched me—with patience.
With the deliberate, focused attention of a boy who is learning that pleasure doesn’t require velocity.
His finger moves in slow circles. His mouth on my neck.
His breathing matching mine. The rhythm shared between us like a song played by two instruments that are finally in tune.
I reach behind me. Find him through the fabric.
He groans—soft, muffled against my neck.
I push his boxers down. He pushes my pants down.
The removal of clothing is not frantic—it’s cooperative.
Two people undressing each other without breaking the hold, without separating, the logistics managed by hands that know each other’s bodies well enough to work blind.
He enters me from behind. Slow. So slow I feel every inch, every adjustment, the way my body opens for his and the way his breath stops and then restarts against my neck.
The sound he makes—not a groan, not the dark voice.
A sigh. The particular release of a boy who has been wound tight for months and is finally, finally, unwinding.
“Penny.” My name. Not a command. Not a claim. A prayer. Said into the skin behind my ear with the reverence of a boy who is inside the girl he loves and is overwhelmed by the simplicity of it.
We move together. His hips against mine. The rhythm slow—not the urgent, desperate pounding from before. The pace of a rocking chair. Of waves on a shore. Of two people who have all night and nowhere to be and nothing to prove and are choosing to feel everything instead of chasing the explosion.
His arm is around my waist. His hand flat on my stomach. My hand on his. Our fingers interlaced. The bracelets touching between our clasped palms—teal and yellow, his and mine, pressed together the way the threads were pressed together when we tied them on at seven.
The pleasure builds. Not like a wave—like a sunrise.
Slow. Gradual. The horizon brightening degree by degree until the light is everywhere and you can’t remember when it was dark.
His mouth on my neck. My back arched against his chest. The sounds we make—soft, swallowed, the intimate volume of two people who are trying not to wake the house and are succeeding because the volume of this act is not the point. The closeness is the point.
“I love you, Penny.” Whispered. Not the declaration from the bedroom or the claim from the alcove. The quiet truth of a boy whose mouth is against a girl’s skin and whose body is inside hers and who is saying the three words with every part of himself simultaneously.
“I love you, Xander.”
The climax comes. Not the shattering, screaming kind.
The quiet kind. The kind that rolls through you like warm water, filling every space, every hollow, every crack that the damage left.
My body tightens around him and his arm tightens around me and we hold each other through it—the wave passing through both of us at nearly the same time, the way it does when two people are synchronized beyond the physical and into whatever lies beneath it.
He stays inside me. Doesn’t pull away. His forehead against the back of my neck. His breathing ragged. His arm still around me. The bracelets still pressed between our hands.
We lie in the aftermath. Not moving. Not speaking.
Just breathing. Two bodies in a bed in a house where the porch light is always on, and outside the window the moon is doing the thing the moon does: shining on everything—the treehouse and the driveway and the neighborhood where two kids grew up ten minutes apart and found each other and lost each other and found each other again.
He pulls the blanket over us. Tucks it around my shoulders. Kisses my hair.
“Still here,” he whispers. The words Cat and I used during that first sober night at the Monaghans’. The words that mean more than “good morning” or “I love you” or any other combination of syllables. The words that mean: I survived the night, and so did you, and we’re both still breathing.
“Still here,” I whisper back.
I fall asleep in his arms. No pills. No craving loud enough to compete with the warmth of his body and the sound of his heartbeat and the weight of his arm around my waist.
The demons will come tomorrow. They always come. But tonight—tonight I am held by a boy who learned to hold without crushing, to want without taking, to love without leaving. And that boy is still here. And so am I.
Still here.
Still breathing.
Still us.